The Economist has been publishing since 1843. I'd imagine that for the vast majority of that time, readers have trusted them with either no details at all about

The Economist has been publishing since 1843. I'd imagine that for the vast majority of that time, readers have trusted them with either no details at all about methodology or little more than a high level overview of what was done— certainly there was no expectation of being able to reproduce and iterate on the full analysis locally, even thirty years ago, much less in 19th century. Don't get me wrong— this is a good direction to be pushing in. But it's something that's been very much enabled by the internet, which is why I'm finding it weird to be blaming the prior status quo on internet culture attention span memes.